


The Only Beautiful Thing in the World

by Speechwriter (batmansymbol)



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, M/M, and i? i am Fully Out Of Control, draco is the Fire Prince, harry is a fire nation colonel with hidden loyalties, hermione is a bloodbending assassin, ron is an undercover dai li agent, tom riddle is the avatar
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 05:20:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28719516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/batmansymbol/pseuds/Speechwriter
Summary: Everyone knows that Tom Riddle is the perfect Avatar. An effortless diplomat and prodigious bender, he’s the Fire Nation’s pride and joy.Strangely, though, Riddle has never been able to access the Avatar State. To that end, Hermione Granger—a Northern waterbending master—has been invited to the Fire Nation’s Royal Palace, in hopes that her qi-therapy techniques will unlock Riddle’s full Avatar power.No one knows that Hermione Granger is part of a society that has been tracking Riddle’s actions meticulously for years. Hermione knows full well that Riddle isn’t what he seems. She knows what he’s planning to do if he unlocks the Avatar State.She’s going to make sure that never happens.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Hermione Granger/Tom Riddle
Comments: 61
Kudos: 136
Collections: chapter updates on these WIPs are why I breathe air, he was just never loved





	1. Method of a Murder

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Welcome to this Tomione Avatar AU. The universe is Avatar, approximately Aang-era in terms of atmosphere and technology, but the Hundred Year War never happened, and so the Air Nomads are still around. All characters are HP. There is also some side Drarry, because of reasons.
> 
> Rating may go up to M depending on future chapters. The fic will be 9 chapters and was written for GoldenTulips. :)
> 
> (Please note that I’ve only seen Legend of Korra once and have forgotten basically all of it, so the worldbuilding here is based solely on the original show!)

The morning that Hermione Granger arrived in the Fire Nation, she woke up thinking about strangulation, her hands outstretched as if to catch a throat between them.

She experienced a moment of disorientation before realizing what she was seeing: her own arms lifted trancelike before her in the semidarkness, a halo of water rippling around her fingertips. She hadn’t bent in her sleep since she was a child.

Rising to her knees on her sleeping mat, Hermione guided the water back into its bowl with a slow sweep of her right hand. She breathed a moment, feeling the hush and sway of the ship moving in the ocean, feeling her heart slow. The ship’s cabin was small and dim, lit by a single red lantern in the corner.

Then she bent over the bowl to wash her face. In the moment before she closed her eyes, she saw her dim reflection held in the water. The young woman looking back at her did not look shaken or disturbed. She looked ready.

#

_At age eight, Hermione took a vow never to kill, a rite of passage for young female waterbenders of the Northern Tribe. “By the spirits of the ocean and moon,” she chanted with the others, the paint cold and wet upon her cheeks, “I vow to use my waterbending to heal, to honor the elemental precepts of life, rebirth, and replenishment. I vow never to injure or kill another soul.”_

_The same day, the boys with waterbending ability took an oath, too. Their oath spoke of power, and how it must be used responsibly. It spoke of strength and skill, mentioning fighters of legendary prowess. It spoke of doing what was necessary._

_Hermione seethed about the differences. “It’s not fair,” she said mutinously to her friends Cho and Pansy the following week, during one of their first healing lessons._

_“Why?” Cho said, brow furrowed in concentration as she passed water through the qi paths in the model before them._

_“I’m glad we’re healers,” said Pansy from across the table, copying a diagram of the model’s wrist. “Who wants to splash around playing soldier all day?”_

_“Besides,” Cho added, “you don’t_ want _to hurt people, do you, Hermione?”_

_“Not for no reason,” Hermione huffed. “But if someone tries to hurt me, or you two, or anyone else, then of course I’ll want to stop them.”_

_She shoved a fistful of water through the model’s qi paths so forcefully that the others flinched._

#

There it was. The Fire Nation’s Capital Island, growing upon the horizon.

Standing at the ship’s prow, Hermione watched it transform from a tiny interruption into a magnificent city. The caldera of the dormant volcano seemed to breach up out of the ocean’s gunmetal waves, glimmering with the filigree of fine buildings. By sunhigh, the _Nimbus_ had sailed into the First Lord’s Harbor.

The captain had told Hermione to expect a small escort to the Royal Palace. So, as they lowered anchor, Hermione hoisted her sealskin pack high on her shoulder and scanned the docks, looking for an official or two bearing the golden flames of the Royal Seal.

What she saw instead was an entire royal procession. At the front stood an empty palanquin carried by four servants. Then came a squadron of eight armored guards, then half a dozen diplomatic officials, swaddled so thoroughly in red silks that they reminded Hermione of newborns. Lastly, a pair of dragon moose were hitched to a fine blackwood cart, already being laden with her crates of clothes and scrolls by yet more red-clothed servants.

Hermione’s breath caught. All this for her. All this in recognition of who she was and what she’d accomplished.

But the prickle of excitement faded, and her stomach tightened in a way that had nothing to do with the harbor’s choppy waters. She would need to look into these people’s faces and smile, and accept their thanks, and shield her true purpose so deeply that none of them would see a shadow of it.

She breathed the salt air, steadying herself, and strode down the gangplank.

One of the officials hurried forward, his round face fit to burst with the way he was beaming at her. She might have been his long-lost daughter. “Master Hermione,” he cried, smoothing his long, perfumed mustache before sweeping into a deep bow. “Welcome, welcome! I am Viscount Horace Slughorn, Honorary Vice Consul to Fire Lord Malfoy. On behalf of the Fire Lord and the entire Royal Family, it is my great, great honor to welcome you to the Fire Nation.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Viscount Slughorn,” Hermione said with a bow in return.

“Please!” He gestured to the palanquin. “Make yourself comfortable, and we can begin our journey into the city at once.”

“Oh, no, I assure you this isn’t necessary.” Hermione frowned at the gold structure and its red hangings. “I’m perfectly capable of walking.”

“All the way to the Royal Palace?” said the viscount, appalled. “Even to Royal Caldera City it’s a walk of two hours.”

“Viscount Slughorn, I’ve been at sea for seven weeks. A long walk sounds wonderful.” At his look of dismay, she added, “Besides, it would be difficult for you to show me the sights of the Capital City if I were behind the curtains.”

The viscount brightened, adjusting his robes with an air of importance. “Ah, of course! I’ll be delighted to answer any questions you may have about our city. And naturally,” Slughorn added more quietly, falling into step with Hermione, “we owe you a debt of deepest gratitude for what you’ve agreed to do for Avatar Riddle.”

Something tightened in Hermione’s chest. She looked into the viscount’s round, friendly face and made herself smile.

“Don’t thank me yet.”

#

_Hermione had a secret._

_A boy named Dean Thomas lived in the house beside hers. Every afternoon, after his waterbending training, he went into the yard behind the house, where glittering ice sculptures adorned the low walls, and practiced. He coaxed water whips from the ground as if raising plants._

_Hermione started watching him when she was eight, not long after their oaths. She practiced his motions. Then, at night, she began sneaking out through her bedroom window, along the dark canals, and belowground to the wastewaters. These twin rivers carried out the sewage from the whole North Pole. There, in secret, she practiced what Dean had learned._

_She was astounded at how easily the moves came to her. True, this wasn’t a real combat situation, there was no real pressure, but the water whips that Dean struggled to bend—they curled around her knuckles, lashed out like serpents in the heat of attack._

_As Hermione’s abilities grew, she began to spend hours in the Tribe’s scroll repositories, poring over aged sheets of vellum that showed fighting form after fighting form, set after set in calligraphic detail. She told her parents that she was practicing her healing with Cho during these hours, and they were pleased. Her own mother was a healer who specialized in teeth, her father a carver of sealtusk replacements for people who had lost incisors and molars._

_It wasn’t as if Hermione was neglecting her healing training. She, Cho, Pansy, and the other girls spent eight hours daily with Master Delacour, an ethereal, moon-touched young woman who was always correcting the positions of Pansy’s wrists. Hermione wouldn’t accept anything less than excellence from herself in the healing huts—but there was so much more to learn, too. On days when she didn’t manage to visit the scroll repository, her brain began to feel tight and squeezed, like an underfed stomach, crying out for new material to digest._

_Then, at twelve, she made a mistake._

_She had become frustrated with Dean. Year after year, he was struggling to perfect forms that she’d already mastered in her secret sessions. He was obviously more interested in drawing artistic patterns in the snow, bending new ice sculptures into glittering form. Hermione had many interests, but art was not one of them—how was she meant to learn anything from someone who seemed to have no interest in this kind of study?_

_One afternoon, she was sitting in her own yard, eyeing Dean over the half-wall, and he was struggling to form a flurry of snow into a shower of ice needles. Hermione had studied the move herself only two weeks before, in the scroll repositories. She found herself blurting out, “Close your fingers.”_

_“What?” Dean said, looking over at her._

_Hermione felt a rush of anxiety. She and Dean were friendly enough, after a whole childhood of being neighbors. Something was thrumming in her like a drumskin just struck. It was risky to speak … but she wanted to tell him the answer. She wanted to show her knowledge. She wanted to walk out of the shadows and show someone who she was._

_Most of all, she wondered … if she could teach Dean the move properly, help him advance, then surely he would return with more advanced moves from Master Flitwick, and she would finally have new visual material? Maybe it could be a benefit for them both._

_The words burst out from her in a rush. “You’re holding your hands like claws. When you compact the snow into ice, keep your fingers pressed together. It helps shape the water. Like this.” Hermione stood, circled her hands over the snowy ground, and a flurry of powder rose before her. As she settled into a deep crouch, she pressed her fingertips together and thrust her hands downward._

_The snow hardened, turned a dark, clear blue, and spat brutally into the snow, an immaculate array of needles._

_Dean’s jaw dropped. Pleasure flushed through Hermione. She had never seen anything like that expression on his face, that shock and delight. It was a look of recognition, of admiration._

_That thrill continued to flood her over the next week. Dean invited his friends Michael Corner and Anthony Goldstein over. She demonstrated all the moves that they were learning, fluid and precise._

_For a while it worked just as she’d hoped. As she worked together with them, the boys made further and faster strides, mastering the moves and retrieving new ones. For two golden months, Hermione had a fresh lesson nearly every day._

_Then one afternoon, near the summer solstice, the High Head of the girls’ healing lessons—Master Umbridge—summoned her to the Temple of the Ocean Spirit._

_The moment she received the summons, all the pleasure Hermione had been carrying inside turned to dread. As she walked beside the stony-faced guard to the Temple, she tried to think of some excuse, of some rationale, but all she could feel was frustration building inside herself. She hadn’t done anything wrong. She hadn’t hurt anyone. Dean, Michael, and Anthony had been helped by it as much as she had._

_It wasn’t fair._

_Master Umbridge didn’t even greet her when she arrived. “I hear, Miss Granger,” said the master with a sickly sweet smile, “that you have been learning waterbending forms that are inappropriate for young ladies.”_

_Hermione knew it was no use lying, had known since she’d received the summons. Umbridge was the strictest master in the Tribe. The woman had done no real healing in decades, had dealt only with examination and criticism since Hermione’s mother had been a girl. Umbridge was as rigid and inflexible as ice itself._

_Still, it was Hermione’s first time standing in the light of the truth. Before she could stop herself, she burst out, “But_ why _are they inappropriate?”_

_“Miss Granger,” Umbridge said softly, “you should trust that those who are older and wiser than you know best. You are a healer. You will never be anything other than a healer. Anything else would disturb the balance that our Ocean and Moon spirits have decreed.”_

_“Ask Master Flitwick,” Hermione said with desperation. “Ask him if he’ll teach me. If Dean or the others told you about me, then they must have mentioned—I can do anything they can do! I can do more! I—”_

_“No, girl,” Umbridge interrupted, a hint of menace in her toadlike face now. “I will not be speaking to Master Flitwick about you. I see you have convinced yourself you are special, that you are different. I see you are arrogant enough to think yourself superior to the other girls in your healing lessons.”_

_“No,” Hermione said, thinking of Cho and Pansy with a pang of guilt, “that’s not it, I just—”_

_“Then you will stop asking for special treatment. You will heal, as you vowed to do at eight years old. You will respect the decrees set forth to you. Or …” Umbridge’s voice sweetened to treacle. “Well, I am afraid I would have to remove you from Master Delacour’s healing lessons, and you would be forbidden from waterbending at all.”_

_Hermione couldn’t speak. She stood there with fists clenched. She wanted to cast a water whip across Umbridge’s petulant, satisfied face. She wanted to bury the woman in three tons of ice. In that moment, she wished to do harm._

_“You may go, Miss Granger,” said Master Umbridge softly._

_Hermione stormed for the white-blue glow of the day outside. So, Umbridge wouldn’t allow her to fight publicly. That didn’t matter, not really. She’d hidden herself for four years. She could keep going that way. She would keep learning from secretly watching, from the scroll repository, until she was a master in all but title—until she could strike out for the Southern Tribe. And when she returned, no one could question her abilities._

_But as she reached the exit, Umbridge added softly, “Miss Granger.”_

_Hermione turned._

_Umbridge adjusted her sky-blue master’s robes. “I hope you know that your nighttime excursions to the wastewaters have been watched for years. We had hoped that you would grow out of this childish, selfish behavior … but apparently you needed a small nudge—” She made a fussy little shooing motion with her fingertips, making a sprinkle of snow cascade out of the air— “in the right direction. It goes without saying that the city patrols will not be so lenient in future … and that you will only be allowed to remove texts related to healing from the scroll repository from now on.”_

_Hermione’s eyes were burning now._

_“And, of course, it would be considered the greatest disrespect for you to turn your back on our traditions in favor of those of our sister tribe. If you learn bending in the Southern Style, you will no longer be welcome in the North. I’m sure your friends and family would greatly regret such a choice.”_

_Hermione would not cry. She would not speak. She would never bow to this woman, would never lose control, would never show her heart again._

_In another world, perhaps she might have spoken freely. In this world, she waited until she was home to burst into furious tears._

_Then, water falling from her eyes, she began to plan._

_#_

“Here we are!” puffed Viscount Slughorn, dabbing his already dripping handkerchief to his brow. “Royal Caldera City. You see the gates ahead? Of course,” he chortled, “they would be difficult to miss.”

“They would,” Hermione murmured. The gates had to be twenty feet tall, carven from dark oak, dragons twining up the pillars that supported them, flames twirling from their mouths like blossoms. She thought she recognized the positions of their languid bodies from a firebending scroll she had studied at the International Bending Academy.

As the procession passed into Royal Caldera City, Hermione tried to smooth down her hair. After a few fruitless minutes, she unwound a leather strip from her wrist and bound it at the base of her skull until her hair resembled the brush of a broom. Always unruly, it had been enlivened by the warm, moist air and the long walk. True to Slughorn’s word, it had been two hours’ journey through the Capital.

They had first passed through Harbor City, a district that champed and steamed with metal production. They’d processed through sub-neighborhoods with markets crammed into narrow alleys, smells of fresh fish and ripe fruit mingling with the shouts of hawkers. Then, in the Lower Caldera, a quieter, cooler district, Hermione had begun to see small, untidy gardens and flocks of children chasing each other, batting a flaming ball back and forth between steel racquets.

This place, so silent and ostentatiously rich, might have been a different city altogether. The wide central street was swept clean, gleaming like gold leaf, and the houses extended vertically into four or five-story mansions.

“I understand you mean to stay with friends in this district, Master Hermione?” Slughorn asked.

“Yes, that’s right.” Hermione slipped a piece of paper from her sealskin pack and studied the address. “Number 12, Dragontongue Road. The family name is Potter,” she added, “and a mutual friend from the Earth Kingdom was meant to arrive several days ago, for—”

“ _Potter?_ ” Slughorn spluttered. He looked like he might topple over. “ _Harry_ Potter? The youngest colonel in a century?”

Hermione couldn’t help breaking into a smile. “Yes, that’s Harry. We met at the International Bending Academy.”

“Well, my dear, we must get you to your friends right away! Right away.” Slughorn had an eager gleam in his eye now. He cast a look around at the procession. “Let’s bring your things there. I’m sure the palace will be glad of some additional time to prepare for your arrival. Macmillan, tell them to expect Master Hermione in another hour or so.”

A young official drooped into an obsequiously low bow, then shooed the other officials ahead, toward the Royal Palace. Slughorn led the remainder of the procession southward, off the main boulevard, onto a beautifully landscaped side street.

Not ten minutes later, they were walking up the long, imposing steps of a fine old villa numbered 12. Each of its four stories had a balcony overlooking the street, each balcony supported by slender oaken pillars engraved with serpentine dragons.

Hermione rapped on the door. After a moment’s muffled footfalls and excited voices, it swung wide to reveal two young men. Ron Weasley, tall and gangling, red-haired and freckled, beaming ear to ear. Harry Potter, his messy jet-black hair shadowing those green eyes that were so unusual for the Fire Nation, his optics askew.

“Hermione,” they said, and then she was rushing forward into their arms.

#

_Hermione pretended to have been cowed._

_During her intermediate examinations, she played the meek, fearful girl that she knew Master Umbridge wished to see. When Umbridge gave her a smug, satisfied nod and passed her, Hermione pretended at relief and pride. Inside, rage and hatred smoldered like an ember._

_She devoured every scroll in the repository on healing and proceeded to the advanced examinations at fourteen. Years ahead of schedule, she was declared a lower master of healing, and entered the huts that were closed to most, where Tribe members nursed catastrophic wounds. The first time Hermione saw an infected gash where a narwhal lynx had gored an unexpecting hunter, she felt lightheaded._

_That faded fast. Soon she was looking into cuts and gangrene and infected veins, into flesh mottled from frostbite, without even holding her breath._

_At seventeen she had her full master’s ceremony. All this was according to plan—because full masters in healing could travel to the International Bending Academy._

_The IBA, stationed at the Northwest tip of the Earth Kingdom, was a unique school. Benders from all four nations were invited there to celebrate the spirits together, to join in cultural exchange. They had also assembled the most renowned library since the lost library of Wan Shi Tong._

_Since age twelve, Hermione had never returned to the wastewaters or asked for the scrolls that were forbidden to her. For five long years, she hadn’t mentioned her discussion with Umbridge. She had even made herself laugh at the willful, headstrong girl she had once been—to Dean and his friends, to Cho and Pansy, to Master Delacour … and especially to Penelope Clearwater, who assisted Master Umbridge with everyday duties. She made sure everyone knew the old Hermione Granger was dead._

_And so, at seventeen, when she told Master Flitwick and Master Umbridge that she wished to study at the IBA—focusing on a qi therapy method that she had begun to devise herself—they saw nothing amiss._

_She hadn’t lied. At the IBA, she did write exhaustive treatises on the intersection of Northern healing techniques with transnational qi-flow studies. She also observed Earth Kingdom fauna under Rubeus Hagrid, studied the historical evolution of firebending from the legendary lightningbender Minerva McGonagall, and learned spiritualism from the great monk Albus Dumbledore._

_But if anyone had looked into the boxes stacked at the back of her rooms, they would also have found scrolls of notes on the waterbending styles of the swamp-dwellers, on South Pole attack forms. At nights, when Hermione’s waterbending was strongest, she slipped away to the river nearby and trained._

_For six months these excursions were a perfect secret, and for the first time in her life, Hermione felt really free. She fused the overhead lashing of swamp-dwelling style, their loose-limbed, free-wheeling motions, with the lower and more rooted stances of the South. She learned to pull condensation from the very air. She experienced the feelings of fusion, of understanding, of mastery—of creating new forms._

_Then, halfway through that first year, she was interrupted by an astonished male voice speaking from behind her: “Where did you learn to bend like that?”_

_She turned to see two boys standing at her back, a freckled earthbender and a black-haired firebender, both staring in awe._

_Fear rushed through her. It was just as it had been when she was twelve. These boys would tell someone, and this would be taken from her, and she would have to choose, finally, forever, between her home and her heart._

_But Harry Potter and Ron Weasley didn’t tell anyone._

_Soon they were meeting upon the riverbanks every night. Harry and Ron would build a fire in a small alcove and go through their coursework while commenting on Hermione’s forms. She would check their writeups on history, and they laughed good-naturedly while she sighed over their errors, and they never questioned her thirst to know more. For the first time in her life, she felt that she was accepted._

_It was at the end of that year that she saw the Avatar for the first time._

_She was eighteen, and she had locked herself in her room to work._ _Even then, even in her cloistered chamber halfway up the East Tower of the IBA, she couldn’t entirely escape the fanfare. Around noon, a roar from the crowd echoed through her window, and she shot an irritated glance down at the congregation in the town square. Thousands of faces were tilted up, catching the sun like brushstrokes of oil paint; thousands of arms pointed westward._

_Apparently, the Avatar had arrived._

_Fine, Hermione thought. Fine—she would take one look,_ one _, and then she could tell Harry and Ron that she had seen the Avatar’s arrival, actually. And better yet, she hadn’t wasted hours of her day milling around outside, bumping elbows with an overexcited crowd, to do so._

_One look._

_Hermione lifted her eyes to the cloudless sky and saw a ribbon of emerald green winding out of the blue. Clothlike wings billowed as the snakelike body approached. Hermione could make out a tiny figure astride the dragon, a snip of Fire Nation red._

_As the dragon neared the walls of the university town, her rider cycled one arm overhead. A brilliant blast of blue flame scythed up into the sky, cut almost immediately with the hiss of water. The dragon looped backward to gasps from the crowd, soaring up through the cloud of steam—and though the figure in red was obscured, his intention soon became clear. The cloud was forming, little by little, into the insignia of the International Bending Academy._

_When the crowd recognized it, they burst into wild cheers and applause. Out from the steam tore the dragon and her rider: the Avatar, Tom Riddle, impeccably postured, one arm lifted in recognition of the greeting, wearing an unbearably handsome smile that—Hermione supposed—nobody would be able to shut up about for weeks._

_She rolled her eyes and went back to her research._

#

Alone with Harry and Ron, Hermione felt like she could breathe for the first time in nearly two months. She had insisted the procession return to the Royal Palace, and Slughorn had agreed to return to Harry’s house in an hour’s time to escort her.

For the time being, she, Harry, and Ron were situated on the top floor of Number 12, Dragontongue Road, where a long, comfortable room was arrayed with pillows. A pot of tea steamed on a low cherry table.

They had exchanged the expected talk about her and Ron’s journeys to the capital. Hermione had described several interesting scrolls about Air Nomad healing remedies she’d read on the ship, while Ron had enthused over his flight from Ba Sing Se on their friend Luna’s skybison. Hermione had felt faintly ill at the concept. She’d ridden that skybison exactly once. The height itself had been terrifying enough without adding in Luna’s apparently cavalier attitude toward steep dives.

“Oh,” Ron had added with a grin, “and Luna and Ginny got married last summer. Ran off to Kyoshi Island, no warning at all.” Harry had yelped with excitement, Hermione had exclaimed, and they had spent some time talking over the wedding. They’d spoken about Ron’s many brothers, who were scattered far and wide over the Earth Kingdom.

Then a tense silence had settled between the three of them, because they had gone through all the normal subjects, and the only thing left was to discuss why they were here.

Now Harry was shuttering the windows, and Ron was absentmindedly flexing one hand into a fist. The signature dark stones of the Dai Li flew from his sleeve and adhered to his skin, forming a line of black stone fingers.

Hermione lowered her voice. “Who are you pretending to be?” she asked.

“An architect,” Ron said. “I know a fair bit about architecture by now. It’s my cover in Ba Sing Se, too.”

Harry returned to his pillow. “It’s sixteen days until the full moon?”

“Seventeen,” Hermione corrected, tugging a blank scroll out from her bag and dipping a quill pen in ink. “Now, what can you tell me about the Avatar?”

#

_Hermione had no particular feelings on the Avatar for the first twenty-one years of her life._

_She knew his story, of course. Tom Riddle was beloved by the whole world. He had been tragically orphaned in infancy and raised in cruelty at an impoverished orphanage in the Northern Earth Kingdom. Despite this, he had become perhaps the most prodigious bender in history, having mastered all four elements at the tender age of eleven with nearly no formal instruction. He clearly had Fire Nation blood, given his sleek dark hair, his pale skin, and his angular features, and he was the pride of the Fire Nation._

_Hermione was aware, too, that he had grown into a magnetically charming young man. It was rumored that Ba Sing Se had thrown the event of the decade with the intent to forge a romantic connection between Riddle and one of the Earth Kingdom’s most eligible young women. But he was twenty-three now and seemed resolutely uninterested in romance, or even in close friendships._

_To most, this only heightened his intrigue. Older people shook their head and spoke in sober, sympathetic whispers about the damage that his cruel childhood must have done to him. They murmured that his background must also have something to do with his ‘little Avatar State problem.’_

_Because the strangest thing about Tom Riddle was that despite his expertise in bending the four elements, despite his obliteration of every opponent in every spar or competition, he had never accessed the Avatar State. Even in moments of extreme duress, when most Avatars would experience an uncontrollable burst of power, Riddle had never lost control. He had accomplished staggering feats of bending, but never with the assistance of his past lives and their power. They were blocked off from him, and no one knew why._

_Hermione found all this interesting in a distant, academic sense, the way she felt about the politics of faraway regions. She supposed Riddle would eventually have some breakthrough led by a guru or a spiritual leader, and then he would master the Avatar State. For now, he did well maintaining balance between the Four Nations—combating natural disasters, serving as an arbiter during moments of political tension._

_She knew that Riddle had visited the IBA’s library at his visit during her first year, looking for additional information on the Avatar Spirit. She knew, too, that Riddle had left suddenly and unexpectedly, during the night._

_But until age twenty-one, she thought little of it. She was distracted by her own secret studies. She was becoming increasingly interested in a type of waterbending theory that had only ever been hinted at before: the manipulation of the water in all types of matter, based in the swampbending style that had so interested her. By studying only at night, she could feel the phases of the moon and the effects they had on her bending._

_She could feel herself filling with power nearer the full moon. Soon she was utilizing the swampbenders’ manipulation methods in leaves, then pulling beads of water out of them until they shriveled._

_Then, near the end of their fourth year, she managed it for the first time. Standing in the middle of a woodland clearing, the light of the full moon raining down upon her from a cloudless sky, she stretched out her hands and felt the water within a rabbit who had stopped in the middle of the clearing._

_Some mad feeling raced through her. She could sense every beat of the rabbit’s heart, the strain of its muscular tissues against her grip. She felt nearly insane. She had never read of anything like this. It felt profane, it felt sacred, and she held the creature for ten long seconds before letting it go._

_She was in a daze for the next several weeks—so much so that it came as a shock when Ron said, “Is it just me, or is something up with Harry?”_

_Once Ron had noted it, Hermione began to see it, too. Harry had become unusually grave and serious over the course of their fourth year._

_“You’re right,” she said one afternoon to Ron. “There’s definitely something wrong with him.”_

_“Reckon we should ask about it?” Ron said._

_So they cornered Harry and demanded to know why he looked so grim and worried, why he had suddenly switched all his classes to a combat concentration when he’d previously been interested in teaching._

_Eventually, after much badgering, he muttered to them over breakfast one day, “Come to the room on the fifth floor opposite the statue of Gregory the Groundbreaker. Eight o’clock. Bring this.”_

_He handed them each a single pai sho tile bearing the image of a white phoenix._

_That night, Hermione and Ron arrived at the room in question to find a dozen people—many of them the school’s masters—in attendance. The meeting was directed by none other than Master Dumbledore, his airbending master’s tattoos almost iridescent in the low light._

_“Mr. Weasley,” said Master Dumbledore. “Ms. Granger. Please, have some tea and take a seat. There is much you need to know.”_

_That was the night Hermione learned the truth about the Avatar._

_Tom Riddle was a murderer. He had killed his father, a non-bender from the Water Tribe, and his grandparents on that side. And for years, his greatest, secret ambition had been to wipe out every kind of bending besides his own native element._

_“To that end,” Dumbledore said quietly, “Riddle has been growing closer to Fire Lord Malfoy and the Royal Family. We believe that together, Riddle and the Malfoys mean to orchestrate an invasion that will destroy the balance of the Four Nations forever.”_

_Hermione sat stunned, horrified, unable to respond._

_“The killing blow,” Dumbledore went on, “will be Riddle’s mastery of the Avatar Spirit. If he ever manages to gain access to that power, he will be truly unstoppable. He will burn the rest of the world’s peoples to the ground.”_

_“Then why haven’t you all gone in and attacked him?” Ron demanded, his freckled face drained of color._

_Dumbledore sighed, brushing his fingers through his long, white beard. “Riddle has covered his tracks carefully. If we were to commit such an act of aggression against the Fire Nation’s most beloved citizen, we would trigger the war we so wish to avoid. Our only hope is a covert operation, one that may make Riddle’s death—and subsequent rebirth into the Air Nomads—seem accidental.”_

_“I’m going to join the Fire Nation army after we leave school,” Harry said, pushing his optics up his nose. “At the least, having a ranked officer there might give us some warning about Riddle’s moves.”_

_“Yeah,” said Ron with a kind of hard panic, “but how are we supposed to kill Riddle? No one can get close to him, no one’s ever even touched him. The only person who …”_

_Ron trailed off. Hermione knew what he had been about to say. The only person who could stand up to Riddle was Dumbledore, and the old monk’s bending was non-aggressive by nature. Dumbledore would never fight to kill, and until the Avatar was reborn into the Air Nomads, the threat would remain._

_For a long moment there was no response to Ron’s question. But Hermione was thinking of the full moon. She thought of how she had stood in that clearing, her hands outstretched, and felt the rabbit’s little heart clenching and straining, yearning to force blood through its veins. Though it had taken all her strength, she had held it still. She had known in that instant that she could have closed her fist and taken the creature’s life. She had felt as if she were standing on a thin sheet of ice, preparing to stamp down, to send herself into black, uncharted depths, where she would know more about waterbending—about her own capabilities—than any bender in history._

_Hermione thought about herself at eight years old, vowing to Cho and Pansy that if anyone threatened them, threatened her, she would stop them. She thought about herself at twelve, opposite Umbridge, full of fury and injustice, longing to act._

_She looked at a room full of people who didn’t know the answer._

_She knew the answer._

_She said, “I know a way.”_

#

“It is my honor,” Viscount Slughorn declared, “to introduce Waterbending Master Hermione Granger of the Northern Water Tribe! Master Hermione is renowned by scholars, waterbenders, and bending theorists worldwide for her breakthroughs in qi-therapy methods, which have contributed to mood and spirit therapy across the world’s Four Nations. We hope that Master Hermione’s healing abilities will finally unlock the secrets of the Avatar State and restore the world to full balance.”

Hermione and Slughorn were standing at the end of the ceremonial hall, which was laid for a grand feast. To the right were arrayed members of the nobility. She had studied all their ranks and customs, and saw styles of dress that indicated counts, baronesses, dukes, marquesses. To the left were members of the military. Harry had described the ranks to her, but she had asked him to omit their names, not wanting to seem suspiciously knowledgeable of people whom she had never met.

At the head of the hall was a long table whose cloth was a mirage of gold stitching. There, upon chairs carven with images of serpentine dragons, were the Royal Family, whose unusual white-blonde hair was said to be touched by the sun itself. Prince Draco, pale, pointed, and languidly postured, sat beside Lady Narcissa, whose aristocratic features were as immobile as stone. To their side was Fire Lord Lucius Malfoy, resplendent in red and gold robes.

Fire Lord Malfoy rose to his feet. “Master Hermione,” he said, his voice cool and satisfied, “we welcome you to the halls of the Royal Palace as our most esteemed guest. It is my great pleasure to introduce you to Avatar Riddle.” He lowered his head in the slightest bow toward his side.

At the Fire Lord’s right hand sat a man with calm, serious features. His black hair shadowed a high forehead, and his eyes were as dark as a moonless night. He was tall and lean, simply but finely dressed in leather-shouldered red robes, and when every eye in the court turned toward him, he wore the attention as if it weighed nothing. Though he was quite motionless, Hermione thought there was something tensile about his body, as if these moments of stillness were a prelude to action. He looked like everything she had been led to expect, as elegant and lethal as a silver blade.

Riddle lowered his head, more deference than would have been required of him. “Master Hermione,” he said in a low, smooth, unassuming voice. “I’ve heard much of your methods. It will be an honor to experience them firsthand.”

As Hermione looked into her target’s face, everything else in the hall seemed to dull, to disappear. She saw both sides of the man at once, like two shadowy portraits laid over one another. She saw the Avatar, the Fire Nation’s beloved, the young man who had risen from nothing, the image of power and humility. So, too, she saw the creature full of hideous purpose, bent on three nations’ destruction, hiding himself as perfectly as a predator among the reeds.

Loathing and disgust flooded Hermione. She had seen the diversity and strength of the Four Nations, had witnessed friendships between benders and non-benders of every kind. She had seen the elegance of airbending and the rooted strength of earthbending, and with every new waterbending text she read, every master she met, every nuance to her culture’s tradition she discovered, she grew more and more enraptured. And this man meant to burn it all?

 _No,_ Hermione thought with a kind of vicious satisfaction. Tom Riddle would never enter the Avatar State. Seventeen days from now, at the full moon, she would make sure of that forever. For four years, every sleepless full moon night, she had stood with Harry, Ron, or members of the Order of the White Phoenix, first bloodbending animals of a larger and larger size, then, finally, bloodbending the Order while they tried to bend, to attack, to defend themselves against her. One by one, they had all fallen.

The Avatar was next.

Hermione placed a smile upon her lips and said, “Avatar Riddle, the honor will be mine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading! kudos/comments always make my day :)
> 
> [tumbl away with me!](https://batmansymbol.tumblr.com)


	2. Shimmer of a Shield

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Brief clarification about the power structure analogy in this fic! Clearly I’ve opted to steer away from a one-to-one blood prejudice analogy, where Hermione would be a child of non-benders. Instead, I’m drawing on canon Riddle’s attitude toward light magic (or the magic of love, or even, say, elf magic) to map out how he treats other elements in this world.
> 
> In HP canon, we as readers recognize light magics as powerful, but Riddle dismisses them and wants to focus on dark magic only, and create a world where dark magic reigns supreme. It’s the same in this fic, except now he’s dismissing other types of bending as weak and foolish, with firebending as the nexus of power and control.
> 
> TMR’s skewed magical priorities are often less emphasized than his obsession with blood and birthright, but I think they’re pretty interesting. I wanted to write something that revolves more wholly around why the most power-hungry person in the world would look down on perfectly valid forms of power (as he does in HP canon).
> 
> Onward we go! Thanks for reading :)

Tom Riddle arrived early to the training yard, as always. Being first to a scene was a small gesture of supremacy. When the others came, they would stand upon territory that felt like his own.

Except that this morning, when Tom moved between the columns, she was already there.

The Water Tribe healer was crouched at the pond in the center of the yard, looking into the water like a child. She wore the rough-spun clothes of her people, her hair an uncontrolled, spiraling mass.

Tom hung back and watched, resentment simmering in his chest. It was insult enough that he, the most prodigious Avatar in recorded history, was inexplicably walled off from the Avatar State. But the idea that the solution was some peasant woman from the Water Tribe? The idea that the brutish forms these people passed as bending might unlock the power he was owed?

 _Patience,_ Tom told himself. No, he didn’t believe she would be any use with the Avatar State—but there was still a diamond of opportunity here.

He sidled out into the morning light. “Good morning, Master Hermione.”

The woman tensed, then turned to face him with a somewhat blank smile. “Avatar Riddle. You’re early.”

“Clearly not early enough.”

She loosed a polite laugh. “I like to meditate at sunrise. I make a habit of punctuality.”

“As do I,” Tom said, making mental notes: _fastidious; meticulous._ Two points so far in Granger’s favor.

The idea had come to him several nights before her arrival. Why not take a waterbending healer for the coming war, one to keep by his side and reverse any injury? And wouldn’t this woman be an ideal option? Hermione Granger was supposedly the best the Water Tribes had to offer. He had read the dozen-odd papers she’d published in the last several years, and they’d confirmed his suspicions that she would be a powerful choice.

The question was whether she was a _safe_ choice. A waterbender, presumably, would never be a devoted follower, which meant he’d be turning to force, threats, or blackmail eventually. So, Riddle needed to choose someone who would break easily, then do what she was told.

Hopefully, Granger would prove herself weak or malleable, the way most people were. He would have to gauge her character carefully over the coming weeks. At the same time, he would gather information, creating a list of her friends and loved ones. Then, if she proved suitable, he would have all he needed to pinch her into place and hold her there.

Tom felt another stab of resentment as he eyed the waterbender’s hands. It would have been much simpler and more elegant to heal himself … but he’d never been able to heal so much as a paper cut. Presumably this was related to his spiritual blockage with the Avatar State.

Until recently, the inability to heal hadn’t bothered Tom. No one had managed to land a blow on him in a spar since he was thirteen, after all. And why should he waste time learning to fuss around with other people’s injuries? Why should he prize such a soft, weak practice, the most archaic branch of Water Tribe barbarism? Better to strike down all enemies before they could touch him. That was true strength.

However, on the threshold of the war, he was beginning to have uneasy dreams about entire armies bent on the singular goal of injuring him. With the Avatar State, he would be truly untouchable … but he was growing impatient. If he did not unlock the Avatar State soon, he needed to be equipped to move forward without it. And in that case, a healer could be a useful resource indeed.

“The others should be here soon,” Tom said. “You requested that a number of firebenders join us?”

“Yes,” said Granger, glancing toward the entrance. “I thought we should begin with a day of sparring, confining you to a single element for each round. There are a number of physical tells that can betray qi blockage.”

“You’d use the studies by Mungo of the Southern Water Tribe as a reference?”

“Yes.” The Granger woman looked at him with surprise. “But of course, you must have read about qi flow in your own research.”

 _Of course I have, you stupid girl_ , Riddle thought.

“Extensively,” he said, keeping his voice mild. “But all the theory in the world comes up short compared to someone with practical expertise.”

The Granger woman did not respond to the flattery, except to give him that blank, almost disinterested smile again. Tom was taken aback. Usually, conversation with the Avatar reduced people to stammering, nervous versions of themselves. If those people were women, there was generally also some level of shy interest involved. But Granger looked at him as though he were a mannequin.

 _Professional, then_ , Tom thought, weighing the trait. A wartime healer would need a steady constitution, but was Granger’s too steady? Was it a sign of some deep resolve?

There was no chance to probe further. “Avatar Riddle,” called a voice from the entrance.

Tom turned and bowed. “Master Parvati.”

Parvati Patil bowed back with a coy smile, followed by five other firebenders. Riddle knew them well—high-level masters at the Royal Fire Academy. When working together, they could, occasionally, provide a mild distraction for him in a spar.

After many introductions, Granger retreated to the head of the yard and seated herself upon a stone plinth. “Avatar Riddle,” she called down, “shall we begin with airbending against Master Parvati?”

“Yes,” Tom said, examining her placid expression. Granger’s reaction to his bending might be a telling sign. Intimidation, obviously, would be ideal. He would spar a bit more ferociously than usual—see if he could provoke a reaction.

The other masters retreated, leaving Riddle alone with Patil in the center of the courtyard. He closed his eyes, feeling each component of the world stirring about him, a symphony of elements at his disposal.

He seized a thick current of air, coiled it around his fist, and struck.

Riddle’s mind relaxed as he fought. He relished the reminders of his own power, even within this lesser element. The immense funnel of wind that tore from the palm of his hand as he ducked blast after fiery blast. The lightness of his feet as he leapt ten, fifteen, twenty feet in the air, finding footholds in drafts, cascading down as if he weighed nothing, then landing with a power that sent gale-force winds ricocheting through the yard. The way Patil staggered back, eventually, and fell, his outstretched hand at her throat.

But when Riddle glanced up at Granger, he couldn’t spy any hint of intimidation, or even admiration. Her face was aimed down at a scroll, where she was daubing notes in tiny script.

The whole day unwound this way. Granger sat there on her stone and took notes while Tom sparred in each element at her request, first taking on one master, then two at a time, then four, then all six. Her reaction was utterly impenetrable. But then, Tom reasoned, he was halfway across the yard; she was focused on her task. She would show herself soon.

At the end of the day, the masters finally traipsed away, exhausted, all with singed uniforms. Riddle bade them a goodbye and approached Granger’s plinth.

“Well, Master Hermione,” he said, wiping sweat from his brow, “is it too early to ask if you’ve noticed anything unusual?”

She capped her ink bottle. “No, nothing unusual, except for your skill. The demonstration was very impressive, Avatar Riddle.”

But as she turned away to roll her scroll into her knapsack, Riddle glimpsed a pursed corner of a mouth. A narrowed eye.

The expression was out of place. Why should she look offended?

Perhaps she had thought he was hunting for a compliment. Sometimes people assumed him arrogant … it was not so unusual. But it wouldn’t do for Granger to dislike him; dislike would deny him access to information.

Tom shrugged on his robe. “The compliment means a great deal coming from you, Master Hermione. I envy your own skills.”

“What is there to envy?”

“You’re far too modest. Even in the Fire Nation, your skills in healing are renowned—and you must have heard that healing is the only subdivision of bending that I’ve never been able to penetrate.”

“Yes, I hope to look into that during our sessions together, in case it’s related to the larger issue.” Granger slipped off the stone plinth and offered that anodyne smile again. “Though perhaps it’s simply because healing is a matter of free spiritual feeling, rather than precision or control.”

The remark disturbed Tom. Granger had been brought here to diagnose him, obviously … and yet, he realized, he did not enjoy the feeling of being diagnosed. She was right. Precision and control were the foundations of not just his bending but his entire worldview. These were the elements upon which he would erect the monument of his greatness.

But was she implying that he didn’t _feel_ while bending? That was ridiculous. Of course, the lesser three elements were forgettable, merely tools for his use, but Tom never felt as deeply as when he used firebending.

In his mind’s eye he saw a flicker of red flame in darkness.

Tom shook the memory and finished tying his robe. Granger glanced at the patterned silk that closed over his chest. It did not escape him that she looked away too quickly, and he wondered if she was as impervious to his act as she seemed to be.

Still, it was irritating that he had to wonder at all. Tom considered himself a swift and accurate judge of character, but he hardly even felt as if he had a first impression of this woman. Would she be of use or not? He had little patience for guardedness, for slippery people.

“Please, Master Hermione,” he said, “allow me to take you to dinner this evening. We still have a great deal to discuss, if we’re to solve this mystery together.”

She hesitated for a split instant, the frizz of her hair lifted in the breeze. Then she said, “Thank you for the invitation, Avatar Riddle. Of course, it would be a pleasure.”

* * *

“Prince Draco,” said Tom. He lowered his head for appearance’s sake, but there was no need. In the royal spa, with a servant combing Draco’s silver hair in a basin of warm water, all the Fire Prince could see was the chamber’s painted ceiling.

“Avatar Riddle,” the prince replied. He usually spoke in an idle drawl that Tom found childish, especially for a man in his mid-twenties. With Tom, the prince took a more respectful tone, although envy and resentment still pierced through on occasion.

The two had spent much of their adolescence together. When Tom had entered court life at the tender age of eleven, he’d immediately become something of a second son to Fire Lord Malfoy. The comparison hadn’t suited Draco at all. Whereas nine-year-old Draco was a talented bender, Tom was a prodigy. Whereas Draco had a sharp mind, Tom had brilliance. Whereas Draco was the Fire Prince, heir to the Fire Nation, Tom was the Avatar, an heir to the entire world.

And so, until Draco had turned seventeen and left for the IBA, he’d always tried to compete with Tom, attempting to secure his father’s undivided affections. This had been both annoying and pathetic.

Fire Lord Lucius and Lady Narcissa, however, were blind to their son’s weakness and immaturity. Lucius had asked Tom multiple times to entrust Draco with their plans, and Tom had eventually resorted to punishing Lucius to get the man to shut up about the idea. The Fire Prince knew nothing. It would stay that way.

“Did the first day with your healer go well?” Draco asked, sounding smug.

“Very well,” Tom said, resisting the urge to bend lightning into the basin where Draco’s hair was submerged. “And your day’s meetings?”

Draco made a dismissive sound in the back of his throat. “We spent all day talking about the missing persons cases. There’s another one, you know—vanished in the Red Sun neighborhood two nights ago. Father’s formed a task force to find her, and the other six.”

“Good. The city has been growing restless. Hopefully this will reassure them.”

“Maybe,” the prince muttered. “Did you want something, Avatar?”

“Yes. The waterbending master and I are to have dinner this evening, and as you went to school together, I wished to ask a few preliminary questions.”

“About Hermione Granger? What’s there to ask?”

Tom paused. “Why do you say that?”

“Granger was probably the most boring person I met at that place.” The Prince sat up with a dismissive look on his pointed face, his silver hair slicked back with water so that it lay flat upon his skull. He flicked a hand toward the servant carrying the brush, who backed away. “It was a running joke that her only personality trait was sitting silently in the library.”

“I see,” Riddle said slowly. “Was she well-liked?”

“It would have been hard to like her or not like her. She never had a real conversation with anyone besides Ron Weasley and Harry Potter. You know, the colonel she’s staying with.” The Prince ran one hand back over his silver hair, which hissed slightly as he heated the water out of it. He tugged it up into its topknot, which he bound with the Fire Nation insignia. “Those three spent every second together. Apparently _they_ thought she had a personality. Although,” he added with a note of pleasure, “Potter was never known for his flawless judgment, of course.”

Riddle made his goodbyes. Whenever the prince got onto the subject of his schoolyard rival, it was time to leave the room. _Adolescent,_ Riddle thought as he left the royal spa.

As he emerged into the sunset, however, he felt excitement stirring inside, lifting its head like an animal awakening from slumber. Perhaps he was overthinking the issue of Granger’s character, and she wasn’t slippery or guarded at all. Perhaps she was nothing more than a modest peasant healer with a vague personality, unusually competent but ultimately bland, no one who would put up any great fight if they were threatened with death or the death of their loved ones.

In other words, perhaps she was the perfect candidate.

* * *

“You should have seen him,” Hermione snarled, yanking a comb through her wet hair. “Oh, he knows how to keep up appearances, but once he’s under pressure, it’s obvious how he really thinks.”

“Hermione,” said Ron, “what exactly are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Riddle’s bending, Ron.” Hermione rounded away from the mirror and flung the comb onto her duvet, which was unrolled on the ground.

Harry, lounging on the duvet, dodged the comb. “What about it?” he said. “I’ve seen him bend. We know he’s the best.”

“I’m not talking about how good he is.” Hermione’s furious sigh hissed out through her teeth. Harry was right, of course. In some secret part of her, she’d hoped that Riddle’s skill might have been exaggerated, but if anything, the stories had failed to convey the depth of his mastery. Hermione had never seen anybody move that way, as if every dodge and strike had been premeditated a month in advance. She hadn’t been able to look away from the elegance of it, his body as beautiful as a painting, down to the breathless invigoration on his face.

Hermione hated the envy she’d felt, watching him. Of course Riddle’s perfection seemed effortless. He’d had the world handed to him. Her whole life, she’d had to skulk in midnights and back corridors even to practice, but Riddle—monstrous Riddle—could be watched, admired, beloved.

Even more, she hated that she recognized that invigorated look on his face. The love of bending, the freedom it held. She had felt that herself.

Hermione closed her eyes, shredding the image of Riddle’s face to bits with vindictive satisfaction. “I asked Riddle to spar against six masters at once today,” she said. “He finally had to start putting a bit of effort in, and when he did, he stopped using other nations’ forms.”

“What?” Ron said, frowning. “How would that help, only using firebending?”

“No, no, I mean he started manipulating other elements only using firebending forms.” Hermione turned back to the mirror in time to glimpse the look that Harry and Ron exchanged behind her.

“Is that dangerous for some reason?” Ron asked.

“It’s not dangerous, it’s disrespectful!” Hermione seethed, bending perfumed water from a nearby pot to soak her curls. “Thousands of years of history have gone into those forms. There’s a cultural reason why airbenders use evasive bending styles. There’s a reason the Water Tribes are invested in adaptability and changeability. Seeing water, air, and earth as just _things_ to shove around using Fire Nation techniques—that’s … it’s …” She shot the perfumed water back into its pot so hard that a dent appeared in the metal. “Well,” she said, “maybe if you two had paid more attention in Binns’ History of Elemental Manipulation class, you’d be angrier.”

“Maybe,” Harry said, a grim look on his face. “I’ll be honest, Hermione, I’m not fussed about Riddle’s feelings about the elements. I’m just focused on how you’ll make his death look like an accident on the full moon.”

Hermione took several deep breaths, coaxing the water gently from her hair so that the curls were slightly more manageable than usual. “Well,” she said, “it won’t be easy. Riddle lives on his own villa in the palace complex, surrounded by his own guards. I saw it today.”

“And,” Ron said, slumping into a chair, “tunneling under the walls into the complex isn’t an option. I tried it this morning—they’ve set layers of metal underneath all the paving. If we tried to cut or blast through it, every guard in the place would hear what we’re—”

A pulley system in the walls clicked. Small bells jingled throughout the house. Two stories below, someone had arrived at the front door.

“Is that him?” Ron whispered as they went for the door.

“Yes, it must be,” Hermione whispered. “How do I look? Angry?”

She was breathing deeply, trying to expel the fury from her face and body, trying to be the meek, placid girl who had once fooled Dolores Umbridge and the Tribe elders.

“No,” Harry whispered as they all skidded down the hall, then the flights of stairs, slipping in their stocking feet. “You look fine.”

“Why are you doing this?” Ron hissed. “What if he picks up on something after spending all night talking to you?”

“He won’t,” Hermione whispered back. “And I haven’t got a choice, Ron. It would be far more suspicious to avoid him. … He’s the Avatar, and my host. It would be impossibly rude to turn him down.”

They had reached the entryway. Hermione smoothed her robe, affixed a bland smile to her mouth, and opened the door.

* * *

“Avatar Riddle!” exclaimed the sixth person to approach their table that evening. “Such a pleasure to see you here at the _Volcanic._ Please, enjoy some of our finest jasmine tea.”

Riddle had seemingly endless patience for the people who came up to gush over him. He smiled up at the older man who was now pouring them complimentary cups. Riddle’s eyes were calm and grateful, his teeth straight and white, his jaw a strong curve like a calligrapher’s brushstroke.

“Thank you, Armando,” he said to the man. “Hermione, may I introduce Armando Dippet? And Armando, this is Master Hermione Granger of the Northern Water Tribe. My mission was to show her the Fire Nation’s finest, so of course, I thought of the _Volcanic_ at once.”

Dippet flushed bright red, his small, slight body puffing up with pride. “Avatar Riddle,” he spluttered, “you are too kind, far too kind. Master Hermione, I hope your stay in the Fire Nation has been comfortable so far?”

“Comfortable is an understatement, Mr. Dippet,” Hermione said with a smile of her own.

Dippet made a deep bow to yet another person approaching. Hermione recognized the medals upon his uniform from Harry’s descriptions: this man was a High General, one of three who commanded the entire Fire Nation Army. He was weathered, in his fifties, with a pitted, pockmarked face and watchful eyes.

“High General Rosier,” Riddle greeted, rising to his feet.

“Avatar Riddle,” said High General Rosier. “Please, please, sit. I don’t mean to interrupt your meal. I simply wanted to wish you the best of luck with your work with Master Hermione. … An honor,” Rosier added, lowering his head to Hermione, who nodded back.

“Very kind of you, High General,” said Riddle. “We hope to see much progress in the coming weeks.”

As the restaurateur left, scurrying along at the High General’s heel, Riddle said to Hermione, “You’ll have to excuse me. It’s been a while since I took dinner at a public restaurant.” One corner of his mouth lifted. “I think the Capital was beginning to gossip about a mysterious illness.”

Hermione laughed obligingly. “You seem to be friends with half the city.”

Riddle lifted his narrow shoulders. He was robed in black, which emphasized the chestnut glint in the dark sweep of his hair. “I’ve lived in the Capital City since I was a boy, and the court is an insular place.” He lowered his voice. “To speak honestly, it can feel suffocating. So, I consider myself lucky to have Nagini, when I wish to travel.”

“Your dragon.”

“Yes. She’s an emerald. One of the last few Common Greens in the world, I’m afraid.”

“Perhaps they should be renamed.”

It was not a particularly funny joke, but Riddle laughed a low, clear laugh.

Hermione forced herself to look away. It was obvious why many firebenders would fall into line with Riddle’s plans. Every word he spoke sounded reasonable and level-headed. It was difficult not to watch his handsome face, not to want to continue listening to that sweet, crisp voice. He was the perfect opponent. Poisoned honey.

Yet Hermione felt she’d done a good enough job so far this evening. They’d spoken about Riddle’s efforts to unlock the Avatar State, from meditation to study. She had described the story of her upbringing as everyone in the Northern Water Tribe knew it: a charmingly spirited child giving way to a practical healer who respected tradition. They’d spoken for a while about her friends, as Riddle had apparently visited the Northern Water Tribe several years ago and made, in his words, “A few acquaintances around our age … I wondered if you might know any of them.”

Hermione was just starting to feel secure during the main course, roast eelbass, when Riddle took her off guard.

“I’ve read all your papers, of course.”

Hermione’s hand slipped, releasing the rice and meat from her chopsticks. “You have? Surely not all thirteen?”

“Yes, I arranged to have copies brought to the palace when I learned we’d be working together.” Riddle sipped his tea. “I thought _Reducing Expansion Damage in Low-Temperature Tissue Repair_ was especially interesting. After reading it, I experimented with temperature manipulation in ways I hadn’t tried before.”

“That’s …” For the first time, Hermione’s voice faltered. She was picturing it before she could stop herself: Riddle seated at a desk with freshly pressed copies of her papers before him, making notes in the margins. Bizarre.

“Do you read academic papers often?” she managed to ask.

“Yes, I try to stay up to date with every major publication on bending theory. … I always find Ba Sing Se University’s _Quarterly_ challenging and engaging.”

“I read the _Quarterly_ the instant it comes out every season,” she said before she could stop herself.

“You must have enjoyed their article about what waterbenders can learn from water-dwelling fauna in the Earth Kingdom.”

Hermione was sure she was staring now. She had a copy of that article rolled up with her things back in the Northern Water Tribe, every page messy with her notes and theories.

Hermione took a long sip of tea, her fingertips icy. She felt unnerved, distressed, and she didn’t know why. Perhaps it was because that article was one of her favorites, and he’d plucked it out of nowhere as if he’d read her mind. Perhaps it was the fact that she was actually tempted to engage in a conversation with Tom Riddle. Even at the IBA, hardly anyone besides her had read these kinds of articles outside classes.

She let her tea rest in its saucer. “Yes,” she said. “I—I found that piece very diverting.”

“I’d like to reread it,” Riddle said. “I had some thoughts on the salamander shark migration that I’d meant to come back to last year … it got away from me, I suppose.” He jotted a note on a napkin, which Hermione could read upside-down— _BSSU_ _quarterly water fauna, adaptation biology_ —and slid it into his pocket.

The prickle in Hermione’s nerves worsened. In that instant, she understood.

What disturbed her was the realization that Tom Riddle was a human being with genuine interests. Apparently, he too was someone who liked to learn, who was devoted to study in ways that were recognizable and even relatable to her. The articulate, well-educated model citizen was not just a cover for Riddle’s inner monster but an actual part of his personhood.

In other words, he was a person. And Hermione was going to murder him. The weight of that fact sank into her now as it had not before. She, who had taken an oath before the Spirits—she would hold a living, thinking person down beneath the full moon and slaughter him as a butcher would slaughter an animal.

She knew it had to be done, but it occurred to Hermione now that she would remember it forever. For the rest of her life she would likely dream about it, however it would happen, the kill festering inside her like an ulcer.

The fine food turned in her stomach for the rest of the meal, which was blessedly short. They parted ways in front of the restaurant, and as Hermione walked back toward Harry’s home, she imagined her hand wrapped around Riddle’s neck. She imagined clenching her fist, the windpipe giving way. _Imagine it,_ she told herself with hard resolve, _until it doesn’t bother you anymore. There can be no hesitation._

Hermione turned onto a walking path that twined through a landscaped park. The sky was cloudless overhead, but the stars were dimmed; the Capital City had millions more lanterns and lights than the North Pole did. In one soil bed was a spray of red flowers, catching the moon just so. Hermione’s anger dimmed, and she stopped, a small smile on her lips, to admire the blooms.

In her instant of hesitation, she heard the sound. A scrape ten feet behind her, as if a boot’s sole had been stopped halfway through an incautious step.

The hair on her arms stood up. She whirled around.

There, behind her, were five people with their faces covered. They were dressed in dark, tightly fitted clothing.

Hermione became immediately aware of her surroundings. This small pocket of the park was secluded, hidden between a tall hill and a line of trees, and at this late hour, it was deserted.

Who were these people? Surely they couldn’t be aware of her purpose? If anyone had found out why she’d come to the Capital City, she would be dragged before the Fire Lord publicly and executed for treason. But then, who—?

One of them moved. The whirl of thoughts died, replaced by a single horrible realization: fighting was not an option. No one in the Fire Nation could know that Hermione Granger was anything other than a healer.

Hermione turned and threw herself pell-mell down the path. But her robes were not made for running. They pressed at her thighs, shortened her stride, and then something heavy was wrapping around her ankles, tripping her. She threw her arms out as she plowed into the path.

Gravel ripped open the skin of her palms. No time to heal. Fingers slippery with blood, Hermione popped the stopper of her water pouch and used a thin stream of water to slash through the weighted leather thongs that had wrapped around her ankles. _Innocent enough_ , she told herself, stumbling back to her feet—even healers used waterbending to cut sometimes, diseased skin, frostbitten limbs—

She was on her feet. Too late. They were upon her. A hand closed on her shoulder with crushing force.

 _Don’t fight,_ Hermione thought, teeth gritted, as another hand yanked her by her hair back down to the gravel path. _Don’t fight … maybe they want a ransom … maybe they think, if I’m kidnapped, the Fire Lord will pay to recover me …_

Another thought burst into her head. A last, desperate hope.

“Please,” she gasped, “please, I need to get home, I have children, I’m on my way back to Harbor City!”

“You think we care?” said one of the assailants in a harsh, gravelly voice.

Hermione felt a pulse of stunned triumph.

They didn’t know who she was. So, to them, she could be an immigrant from the Southern Water Tribe. She could be a fighter.

She could do anything she wanted.

* * *

Tom had been following Granger at a minute’s distance since they’d left the _Volcanic_. He didn’t expect anything interesting to happen. It was more a matter of procedure.

More than anything else, Tom needed to know that Granger was predictable. The risks of trusting a captive healer were immense. If he was going to blackmail and imprison the woman, she would come to loathe him. He needed to ensure that she wasn’t the type to let him die in a moment’s impulse if he was ever, Spirits forbid, so badly injured that only her healing could save him.

In Tom’s experience, a good way to determine someone’s reliability was to watch them carrying out uninteresting plans. If, for instance, someone stated that they would eat dinner at sundown and retire to bed two hours later, and if they kept to that schedule, it was a strong indicator that they’d behave reliably under other, weightier circumstances.

So far, Granger had shown signs of reliability. She walked quickly, head bent as if remembering long hours of study, with no meandering detours or unexpected choices.

But then five Embertongues had appeared, whispering out of the trees between Tom and Granger. Tom had hardly ducked out of the way when she whirled around and saw them.

Tom had frozen in the shadows of the park, cursing their idiocy. Had he really needed to _tell_ the group that the highest-profile waterbender in the Fire Nation Capital wasn’t to be made a target for the kidnapping initiative? Did he have to explain every single detail to every single idiot in order for them to avoid this kind of blunder? Did they even realize who she _was?_

And now, thanks to their incompetence, Tom was faced with a dilemma. As a weighted tripper flew through the air and wrapped around Granger’s ankles, sending her to the gravel with a pained gasp, he weighed his options quickly. He could storm in and rescue Granger, play the hero to the helpless healer … but then he would have to explain why, exactly, he’d been following her.

She might even find it suspicious that he and this masked group were both in the park at the same time, and those were two and two that she could not be permitted to put together. The woman was undeniably brilliant, that much was obvious from her papers, although she’d demurred at dinner when he’d tried to engage her. Doubtless that maddening humility was something instilled in her by the Water Tribe.

Now Granger had cut herself loose and was staggering upright. The five Embertongues had closed the distance.

There was nothing for it. Tom would simply have to talk himself out of the consequences. He gritted his teeth, then opened his mouth to catch their attention, already mapping out a strategy to knock them out one by one.

His mouth stayed there, open, no sound coming out.

The shadows of the trees offered him a clear vantage of the scene. An instant ago, Granger had been on her knees on the gravel, cowering and fearful, one of the Embertongues holding a fistful of flame at his side.

Now she was moving so quickly that her limbs were a gray-black blur in the moonlight. Her palms were a bloodied mess, Tom could see that much, but she spared no moment to heal them. Her face had contorted with concentration so that she looked livid. Teeth bared, eyes flashing, she seized the healing water in her pouch and thrust her hands forward.

Five identical jets slammed into the Embertongues’ chests. They staggered backward. By the time they had begun to reorder themselves into fighting positions, Granger was already moving again. She was pulling water from the moist soil of the park itself. She ducked three fire blasts in quick succession; she sculpted a ball of water into an icy slope with the flick of a wrist and skidded up, over it, feet light, catapulting herself into the air, her feet landing on one of the men’s shoulders. She springboarded over him, sending him to the gravel, and somersaulted onto the grass.

Already she was on her feet. Now she was no longer surrounded, and she had gathered more water up from the lush earth. She cycled her hands over her head and lashed her arms out to the side, striking aside blast after blast of flame in huge hissing puffs of steam. One Embertongue had been knocked unconscious and lay sprawled in the grass—but the others had recovered, and they were closing in fast now. Granger took a fire blast to the side and let out an animal sound, then slung a shot of ice like a discus into the man’s jaw. It hit with a splintering sound. He keeled back and did not move.

The remaining three were at close quarters now. Granger jerked as an unsheathed blade sliced across her upper arm, but then the water she’d been collecting into a column shot out. It divided into lashing tendrils like dozens of flying ribbons, and then in tandem, they seized the men’s limbs, bringing them crashing into one another. She froze their bodies to the grassy ground beneath thick packets of ice.

Tom saw her lean over one of the Embertongues and pant something inaudible.

“No,” the man bleated. “No, no idea, we just—just saw you …”

Granger placed her hand over his face, then the others’. Within thirty seconds, each man was unconscious.

Then, only then, did she slump back to the ground. Tom stared at her face, which was contorted with shock and the remnants of fear, but her hands didn’t shake as she circulated a glow of water over the burn in her side. Tatters of charred fabric fell away, and the smooth skin beneath knitted back together. Next was the cut in her upper arm, and lastly, her bloodied hands.

Granger did not linger long. She smoothed back her bushy hair and hurried away from the unconscious men. Tom saw her break into a run near the edge of the park. Then she was gone.

Tom Riddle stood at the treeline, hardly breathing, still staring at the spot where the waterbender had disappeared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading! kudos/comments always make my day :)
> 
> [tumbl away with me!](https://batmansymbol.tumblr.com)


	3. Fury of a Fight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this fic is weird, man

Hermione’s side ached and her palms felt vulnerable. Healing could fix the wound, but it couldn’t fool the body into forgetting. The injury lived in the new tissue; what was fresh was also weak and queasy, and would need strengthening.

It was sunrise, and the guards had shown her into the heart of Riddle’s private villa. There was a courtyard at its center, a beautiful plain of golden stone where they would do their work that day. A semi-public yard had been good enough for sparring, but the kind of intimate inspection required of qi therapy would demand privacy.

“Master Hermione,” said the smooth voice from behind her.

She turned, having unrolled a pair of reed mats upon the stones. Her palms twinged, but she didn’t acknowledge the discomfort.

“Avatar Riddle. Please, sit.”

“Thank you.” Riddle took the mat opposite her, legs crisscrossed. “I trust you slept well?”

“Very soundly. Last night’s dinner put me to bed like a baby.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Riddle brushed back a dark strand from his forehead. Perhaps it was because of the early hour, but Hermione thought he looked unrested. A single rumple in the immaculate wave of his hair. The top toggle of his robe not quite worked into its loop.

Hermione had to look down at her prepared plans to mask a sudden stab of hatred. She detested Riddle’s lustrous hair and his tiger-strike posture and his façade of humility. She loathed that mere hours after being attacked by people who espoused his disgusting worldview, she had to sit here and pretend to be taken in by his charm, yet another adoring fan of the Avatar.

That was the most insulting part about her life of secrecy—that she always had to play at ignorance. For more than half her life now, she’d been acting this ridiculous, degrading part. She, who’d delved deeper into waterbending than anyone else in the Northern Tribe, who had learned more than all the rest of them by now … she had to pretend she knew none of it. And here, again, to Riddle, she had to pretend to be an unthinking pawn in his game.

And just as she knew Riddle’s plans, she knew that last night’s attack had not been some random event. Once she’d returned to Dragontongue Road and explained everything, Harry had told her that multiple people had gone missing around the Capital City: two waterbenders, three earthbenders, and an airbender.

“You think Riddle has something to do with it?” Ron had said, while Harry paced Hermione’s bedroom and she moved water over the burn in her side, healing the deeper damage.

“Of course he does,” Hermione fumed.

But Harry frowned and said, “I’m not sure. It’s too small-scale. What’s the point in kidnapping half a dozen benders from around the city when his plan is a worldwide invasion? I assumed it was a few nutters who think the same way that Riddle does.”

“No,” Hermione said. “These people weren’t amateurs, Harry. They were dressed the same way, like a uniform, and they weren’t enjoying themselves, frightening me. They’re kidnapping their victims for a reason. I think they had their own kind of weaponry, too. They threw something at me to trip me, and there was some kind of insignia stamped into the leather.”

“What did it look like?” Ron asked.

“An animal. It might have been a dragon, or a snake …”

She broke off as Harry froze mid-pace, then dashed out of the room. There was just enough time for Hermione to exchange a bewildered look with Ron before Harry flew back in with a jacket in hand. He thrust it under her nose. “Was that it?”

“I—yes.”

All three had fallen silent, looking down at the insignia of the coiled dragon on Harry’s colonel garb.

“If they’ve got military equipment,” Harry muttered, “then yeah, Riddle could be involved. We don’t know how far his plans with the Fire Lord have spread. … This could be a sign that he’s planning to start the invasion soon, whether or not he’s got the Avatar State on his side.”

They’d spoken a while longer. Ron, who had experience finding missing people while fighting organized crime in Ba Sing Se, would investigate the disappearances. Harry, with a detailed description of the tripping device, would try to trace its origin back through the Army, see if any equipment had gone missing recently.

Meanwhile, Hermione would have to try even harder not to let Riddle see her hatred. If there was one benefit from the attack, it was that all those delicate doubts about killing him had evaporated.

They began with several minutes of meditation, which helped to soothe Hermione’s thoughts. Then it was time to begin the work that she had been summoned to do. She bent her pouchful of water into a large basin beside Riddle. “When you’re ready, Avatar Riddle, please take off your robe and lie face-up on the mat.”

Hermione expected another gracious comment, oh of course Master Hermione, whatever you say Master Hermione, but instead Riddle’s eyes fixed hard on hers. Something contracted in his expression so quickly that she nearly missed it.

Then his face was completely normal again. He slipped his robe off his shoulders, leaving him in dark breeches that came to the knee, and said, “I’ll make some shade. This sun will only get worse.” He dug his heel into the stones of the yard, and a slanted sheet of rock slid up and out of the courtyard, casting a long shadow over both of them.

He lay back. Hermione settled beside him, moving two glowing pools of water over his torso, but she was aware of his eyes affixed to her face again. What had that hesitation been? Was he insulted that he required the services of a waterbender? Or was he paranoid, laying himself out this way beneath any other bender’s hands?

Surely if he suspected her intentions, she’d have been arrested and questioned?

 _You could do it now,_ she thought, moving her palm over his solar plexus. Her fingertips brushed his abdomen; his skin was warm. _You could kill him now._ She needed the full moon for total muscular control, but last night, she’d struck the attackers unconscious by squeezing a few choice structures shut, reducing blood flow to the brain. Such things were still within her grasp.

He was right here, under her hands. She could form the water into a pick and drive it into his treacherous heart.

But— _patience,_ she told herself. This wasn’t an act of vengeance but of strategy; she wasn’t just trying to stop one man but to prevent a war. It must seem accidental. The tragic halting of his heart before its time.

Besides, she only had one chance, and the meditation had not relaxed Riddle. The night of her arrival, she’d been able to see it all the way across the palace hall, and from this close, half his body laid bare, it was even more obvious. He was always ready to strike. He was tension. He was preparation. There was a guard here that would never fall.

#

Her hands were small and cool upon him. She felt like a part of the water itself.

Those hands had appeared in Tom’s dream last night. A strange dream. He’d been standing upon the prow of a great warship, at the head of a military force beyond imagining, the waterbender at his side. But Granger was not cowed or chained, the way he’d initially pictured in his plans to use her for healing. She was standing tall, alone, hands outstretched. Before them rose a great tsunami, teetering at its base. Tom watched the great wave as it tipped forward, toward his target … then backward, toward their own ship. Then he’d woken up.

Unable to sleep, he’d spent the rest of the night mulling the fight between Granger and the Embertongues. His first instinct, of course, was to see the woman as an unacceptable threat. A mind like hers, coupled with the fact that she, too, led a secret life … with the Embertongues’ lack of discretion and her closeness to him in the coming weeks, what if Granger discovered one of his plans?

He’d even considered the idea that she knew something about his plans already. It was obviously suspicious, a waterbender with secret fighting capabilities given this level of access to him.

Too many questions remained there, though. Firstly, how would some peasant woman a continent away have uncovered the tracks he’d been so careful to conceal? Secondly, it wasn’t as if Granger had written a letter to the Fire Lord pleading to use her qi-therapy methods on Tom. The Fire Lord had invited her himself on the suggestion of Severus Snape, one of Tom’s most loyal followers abroad.

Besides, the woman posed no real threat to him. She was an excellent fighter, that much was clear—but even now, as Tom lay motionless under her hands, he knew that if she tried to strike, he could kill her within an instant. If this was some attempt to hurt him, it was a feeble one.

And he had been careful, so careful, for a decade. Yes, she must be ignorant of his true purposes.

Still, Tom had lain awake in his room and seen her body contorting, flexing like a single lean band of muscle, dispatching one opponent after another after another. Something fascinating in it. This was a style he had never seen performed nor even described. The lithe rearrangements of her limbs were too fluid for Northern or Southern forms, yet too premeditated to resemble swampbending forms. He suspected she had invented it herself.

With that idea, another thought had come to him.

The woman was hiding her abilities because the Northern Water Tribe wouldn’t permit her to learn combat bending. She must have spent years upon years in secret developing her skill. And someone so skilled, so repressed … surely she harbored a wellspring of resentment against her own people for denying her the acclaim she deserved?

It seemed nearly ridiculous to hope it, but what if he _could_ convert Granger to his cause? Surely she’d eyed Master Parvati yesterday with envy, wishing that she too could be recognized for her abilities? Surely this would be proof to her of the Fire Nation’s superiority?

If she became one of his followers, she could heal him not out of fear, but out of a real desire to keep him from harm. It could be perfect.

Yet he must be careful not to reveal too much. As Tom watched Granger work, he knew the first step. He must first tease out a confession of her secret abilities. Once she told him the truth, he could convince her that he alone understood her, that he alone had her best interests at heart …

Actually, Tom was unsettled to realize that he _did_ feel a sense of understanding toward Granger. Her demure, docile exterior was as much an act as his own. Hadn’t he played a role for a decade now, hadn’t she done the same? Didn’t he feel rage at having to mask his true desires?

Granger’s fingertips hovered above his heart. “Try to release some of this tension,” she murmured.

He shifted on the mat. “That isn’t easy for me, I’m afraid. Old habit.”

She tutted under her breath. “Your masters should have emphasized relaxation during training.”

“Is that your expert opinion?”

A hiccup in the smooth motions of her hands. “What do you mean,” she said.

“I mean that you must treat a lot of muscular injuries in benders, thanks to poor form.”

“Oh. Yes, of course.”

Tom toyed with broaching the subject directly. _Surely someone like you,_ he could say, _with so much knowledge of the body … I’d expect you to be a quick study at fighting yourself._ But being so direct might scare her away. At the least, she’d surely guess he’d seen the attack last night.

A different tactic slid into his mind. He mulled it while her water-covered fingertips moved from his shoulder to his ribcage, making his skin tingle. Tom had told few people what he was considering telling Granger now, and yet if he was to win her sympathies, his best tactic might be—bizarrely—the truth.

He said, “The tension isn’t from my training. It’s from my childhood.”

“How so?” she asked, all politeness.

“You may have heard I grew up in an orphanage on the northernmost tip of the Earth Kingdom.”

Granger moved the cool rush of water up to his throat. In the shade her brown eyes were like old wine, shadowed by dark lashes; she did not meet his gaze. “Yes, I’ve heard parts of the story.”

“May I ask which parts?”

“That you were orphaned as an infant. That you managed to master all four elements by the age of eleven, despite the orphanage being an unwelcoming place.”

He twisted his mouth into half a smile. “Unwelcoming would be one way to describe it.”

A furrow formed in Granger’s brow. She didn’t ask him to go on, but neither did she change the subject.

Tom continued. “My mother was a firebender, and a wanderer. She died at the orphanage, handing me as a newborn into their care.” He closed his eyes and saw the orphanage, the tall, forbidding building that housed hundreds. “The place was near to both the Northern Air Temple and the Northern Water Tribe,” he murmured. “So, there were scores of orphans from the other three nations. Even the Air Nomads, who usually raise children as a community—even they had strays who had left the temples, whose children trickled into the orphanage. There were dozens of children there who could bend, but I was the only firebender. We were halfway across the world from the Fire Nation.”

Granger moved the water down to his navel. Its coolness in the hot sun made it easier to keep speaking.

“I first used firebending when I was four or five. I was angry about something. Food, I think. I burned another boy in a tantrum, and from then on I was seen as a danger. I was punished when I used firebending, so I learned to keep it to myself. The matrons would occasionally let us out into the yard to play … I stayed inside instead, locked myself in the dormitory, and practiced in secret.”

Was he imagining it, or did her hands hesitate briefly in their paths?

Tom forced his own hands to relax on the mat. “Everyone was unnerved by my firebending, or perhaps just by me. I was quiet. Unlike the others. Maybe I should have hated my bending for separating me from the rest, but I clung to it instead. I didn’t know yet that I was the Avatar, of course, but I knew I was born to be a firebender.”

Tom could still see the way the other children had looked at him, with a mixture of derision and fear. They had recognized that he had the power to hurt them, and yet Tom had felt their power, too—the power in being normal, just like each other, able to exclude and taunt him. He had resolved at six or seven not to let the exclusion matter to him. He was different, which meant he was special. Let all the other little brutes talk about him in secret. He didn’t care.

“By the time I was ten,” he went on, “I was an angry child. One day I took it out on another boy. Something juvenile—he’d been given a toy, I wanted it. We fought, and I scarred his arm in my anger. The matrons left me outside in the yard that night. It was freezing, winter, and I was wearing rags. I would have frozen if not for my firebending. But I had to be punished for my transgression.”

Tom’s eyes were still closed. There, in the dark, he saw the curl of red. It had been a moonless, painful night, the wind tearing at him, and yet in him was the breath of the dragon. He’d gazed down into his palms as fire blossomed out of the air, and he’d known the truth then: that this flame of life was the only beautiful thing in the world, that all else was cold and harsh, that he would never be able to rely on anything but his own power.

Tom realized he no longer felt the cool touch of water. He opened his eyes. Granger had returned the water to its basin. On her knees, she was watching him speak, looking troubled.

Tom was encouraged. It was more emotion than she’d shown since he’d met her. The story was doing its work.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“I fled that night. There was a seaside town ten miles to the east. I followed the road on foot until I reached it, and found a Fire Nation cargo ship in the bay. I stowed away. … The crew found me the next day and wanted to drop me at the next port, but I showed them some of the firebending I’d managed to teach myself and begged them to let me stay, told them I’d work in the boiler room. The strength of my bending impressed them. They said they would bring me to the Fire Nation after their journey around the coasts of the Earth Kingdom—an eight-month voyage.”

Tom sat up slowly under the shade of the stone and snapped his fingers, bringing a tiny tongue of flame to life between his fingers, before snapping it out again. “The men were kind to me. In the evenings they would teach me firebending, and within a month I had learned every move any of them had to show me. In the boiler room I realized I could bend the coal within the burners, too, and when I showed one of the crewmembers, thinking it was related to my firebending, he realized the truth.”

“That you were the Avatar,” said Granger.

Tom nodded. “The crew were awestruck. They encouraged me to bend anything I could, and soon I was using the coal to create my own kind of rudimentary earthbending, although I had only been taught firebending forms. Waterbending and airbending followed soon after. The crew even pooled some of their meagre earnings to buy me scrolls and books to help me learn to bend the other elements. They told me how they would take me to the Fire Lord when we returned to the Fire Nation, and they kept their promise. By the time we returned here, to this city, I’d reached low levels of mastery in all four elements, and Fire Lord Malfoy took me under his wing—practically adopted me. That’s why … well, I told you last night. I’ve lived at court here a long time.”

In the silence of the yard, Tom could hear the distant twittering of birds. It was funny, but he somehow felt like he was lying to Granger, although every word he’d spoken was true. He’d told so few people these details that they seemed hardly to belong to him anymore. The facts were a treasure in a locked box, and now he had taken them out and was turning them over, seeing how they caught the light.

The greatest treasure, of course, had come afterward. Fire Lord Malfoy had pampered him, practically adopted him, paid his entrance fee to the Royal Fire Academy. Tom was idolized at the Academy and acquired a loyal following within days. He’d seen immediately how civilized the Fire Nation was compared to that hideous world of the orphanage … here there was order, structure, rank. Here was the respect he was owed.

He supposed it was the first time in his life he had been happy. But it was more than happiness. It was a feeling of correctness. That story he’d always told himself as a child, about his being special—it was true. It had always been true. And it had taken his countrymen to see it.

“Why are you telling me this?” asked Granger quietly.

Tom lifted his shoulders. “You intrigue me.”

“Why?”

“Such a respected master at such a young age. You write with such passion and detail, yet you were so restrained last night about the same subjects.” Tom let his eyes move slowly over her features, a trick he had learned in adolescence, and was gratified to see a tinge in Granger’s cheeks. “You have a degree of control that I admire, Master Hermione. It reminds me of myself.”

Tom let himself luxuriate in the silence, in her evident focus. Sometimes, when Tom made his moves upon other people, tugging threads within their minds, he imagined he could see the very movements of their thoughts. From the consternation on Granger’s face it was clear that she would not shatter into sympathy on the spot, confess that she, too, had kept the real truth of her bending secret a long time … but then, he had not expected her to. She had spent a lifetime tying herself into knots. It would take him some time to unwind her.

Tom lay down upon the mat again, satisfied. “I’m sorry, I’ve interrupted your focus. Please, go ahead.”

#

Hermione had not done such sloppy qi tracing since she was a child. She moved the water up Riddle’s spine, but she barely saw the glow, barely felt the pulse of energy within his body.

His story had disturbed her in several ways. Firstly, it explained Riddle to her in a way she hadn’t asked for. Hermione knew something about holding hatred inside—even now, after fourteen years, didn’t she imagine Dolores Umbridge’s face to galvanize herself with spite? And while it was obviously short-sighted for Riddle to associate everyone from other nations with the people at his orphanage, and all things kind and good with the Fire Nation ship who had taken him in, Hermione could hardly go back in time to that isolated, resentful 11-year-old and explain why, exactly, he should forgive everyone who had shunned and injured him.

Even more disturbingly, when Riddle had said she reminded him of himself, a small voice in her mind had said, _Yes_. Because she had sequestered herself away to learn, too. She had burned with the desire to learn. She had felt different from the others in the Water Tribe, and rapacious and eager when she realized her own skill.

But what agitated Hermione the most was that Riddle had told her the truth. This was a closely guarded story, Hermione knew, because Albus Dumbledore had told her, Ron, and Harry a version of the same events that he’d pieced together painstakingly from others involved.

 _Why?_ she thought as she passed the water over his triceps, his elbow, his forearm. Why had he done it? Why confess to her this way? There must be a reason. She wouldn’t be fool enough to believe that he really wanted to forge some connection.

It had to be something to do with his strange look earlier, his hesitation to disrobe and lie back.

_You have a degree of control that I admire …_

The puzzle unwound in an instant. Hermione’s stomach plummeted. He knew. Somehow, word had returned to him about her fight last night. He knew she was secretly trained in combat—and that had intrigued him.

Yet he couldn’t know the full truth, about her purposes or her bloodbending, or she would be dead.

There was only one thing to do. The longer she let him sit with her secret, the longer he would have to draw conclusions about her intentions. The way to keep control of her image was to meet him where he stood.

“You haven’t been honest with me,” she said quietly, moving the water up to the back of his neck. Riddle’s dark hair moved weightlessly in the current. The muscles in his shoulders tightened infinitesimally.

“How so, Master Hermione?” he replied, turning his face so that she could see his profile. “I don’t tell that story often, but I promise you it is the truth.”

“No, I believe the story. But I don’t think you told it to me because of what I did or didn’t say over dinner last night.” Hermione returned the water to the basin and sat back on her heels. “I think you told me because you know I have certain abilities I keep private. I was attacked last night on my way home from dinner, and I used waterbending to overcome the attackers. But I think you knew that already, too.”

She caught the ghost of surprise upon Riddle’s face. Then he pushed himself up—the movement of his muscles was obscene; she looked away—and sat opposite her again. Outright calculation shone in his eyes, a gleam that made her feel something low in her stomach. It was not a pleasurable feeling, and yet it compelled her. She was challenging him.

“I should have known better than to try and deceive you,” he said quietly. “You’re right. I saw it happen, actually. The walking trails in that park are some of my favorite, and I heard the struggle. I was about to intervene when you handled the situation yourself. I’ll admit I was too taken aback to say anything until you’d gone.” He lifted one brow. “It was impressively quick, after all. Ten seconds? Fifteen?”

Something glowed tight and hot in Hermione’s chest at the word: _impressive._ She couldn’t help herself. It was that old victorious feeling of being admired, and this was no little compliment from Dean Thomas’s preadolescent friends. This was praise from the Avatar—the monster, the prodigy, the world’s foremost bender.

 _Yes,_ Hermione thought with a kind of vicious pleasure. Yes, he should be impressed. She knew more about waterbending than even he did.

“I didn’t have a timepiece to check my speed,” she said. “I’ll have to make sure to bring one next time.”

An amused spasm in Riddle’s mouth. These moments of uncontrol were oddly mesmerizing upon his face, like a weaving trying to tug free of the strictures of its loom.

Hermione realized she had no idea what to say. This was miles outside the scope of what she’d prepared for. Riddle wasn’t supposed to know she was anything but a healer, and he certainly wasn’t supposed to have seen her take out four armed assailants. He wasn’t supposed to tell her anything about his past, either, let alone deliver some long, descriptive monologue.

Riddle, however, seemed perfectly at ease. “I’ll admit I can’t understand it. You could have left the Northern Water Tribe at any time. A bender of your skill—why not set out for the Southern Tribe?”

“It’s my home. I would have had to leave my family, my friends. I would never have been welcome in the North again. That was made perfectly clear when I was twelve.”

“I see. And ever since, you’ve kept yourself hidden. They have no idea what you’re capable of, then.”

“None.”

His lips thinned. “You’ve been treated unfairly. In the Fire Nation your skill would be celebrated, not scorned and stifled.”

Hermione felt a jolt of discomfort. She did resent Umbridge and the tribe’s rigidity, of course—but the idea of agreeing with Tom Riddle about the Water Tribe’s faults made her bristle. “I think you’ve mistaken me, Avatar Riddle. I don’t hold the waterbending elders’ traditions against our tribe as a whole.”

“Really? You don’t think of everything you could have learned with formal training, the life you could have led if you weren’t forced to hide in the shadows? I know that feeling. I’ve felt it myself.” It was impossible to look away as Riddle leaned forward, dark eyes blazing. “They’ve wounded you more than they ever did me.”

Disbelief washed over her discomfort. Again he was being honest. He was all but acknowledging his prejudice against the Water Tribe—unthinkable for an Avatar. _Why_ was he saying these things to her? What did he have to gain from convincing her of anything?

Unable to think of any real response, she said, “You’re saying you feel wounded by the Water Tribe, then, Avatar Riddle?”

He did not draw back or seem defensive. “After all I’ve told you of my childhood, yes, I’d expect you to understand why I find the Fire Nation to be a refuge. And frankly, after everything you’ve told me of your life, I’d expect you to agree.”

“But the children at your orphanage weren’t even brought up by the Water Tribe,” Hermione said, unable to keep her voice from rising. “Just because our elders have some retrograde attitudes and you met some unkind people in your childhood—that’s not a referendum on the Water Tribe itself. There’s no reason to hold these things against the Tribe, or against waterbending!”

Realization spread across Riddle’s features. He leaned back against the slab of stone that still shadowed them. “Against waterbending,” he repeated slowly. “So, that’s why you were irritated after the demonstration yesterday. You saw that I sometimes use firebending forms to bend the other elements.”

Hermione’s throat tightened. Her anger, the desire to make him understand, warred with caution. But they were already speaking with a bizarre level of honesty. He had already guessed the truth. She may as well confirm it.

“Yes,” she burst out. “It did irritate me! I’ve spent my whole life studying waterbending, most of those years spent in secret. I’ve risked so much to teach myself these forms. And you’d just set them aside and bend my native element with a firebender’s methods?”

She realized she was speaking in her own voice, the sharp, righteous tone she only ever dared use around Harry and Ron. She searched for something to say to soften the diatribe—but Riddle didn’t seem angry. He lifted one brow, imperial. “I’m the Avatar, Master Hermione. I don’t view the elements as separated in that way. I learned firebending first, and as I mastered the other elements without formal training, it became a natural reflex for me to use firebending forms for all the elements. More than any other, firebending forms are efficient, powerful, good for combat. They suit me. Why should I restrict myself?”

Hermione’s mouth was open now. He actually seemed to believe what he was saying. “You _are_ restricting yourself!” she said. “Waterbending forms match our element most naturally. It doesn’t just have to do with culture. It’s also about efficiency, grace, and function. If you read every issue of the _Quarterly,_ then you’ve read the speed analyses done by Bagshot et al, which show how formal evolution has driven each style of bending over time to have greater power and impact. If you replace that history with another style entirely, you don’t reap any of those benefits!”

There was no real change in Riddle’s expression, but she could sense that the words had nettled him. “You found me graceless yesterday, Master Hermione?”

“I—that isn’t what I said.”

“But you’ve just implied my bending was unnatural. Inefficient.”

A knot of frustration was tangling up in Hermione’s chest. “You’re twisting my words.”

“Yet you aren’t contradicting me.” She could hear the control in Riddle’s voice.

A shiver of fear and disbelief ran over her, but they’d both said too much. Neither could back away now. “All I’m saying,” she ground out, “is that you, the Avatar, who study bending theory at least as much as I do, should be able to see the obvious benefits of waterbending forms.”

Riddle leaned forward, his dark eyes agleam. “Then let’s test your hypothesis.”

“My—I— _what?_ ”

“We’ll spar with water. I’ll constrict myself to the Fire Nation’s martial style, and you use waterbenders’ methods.” He gave her what was clearly meant to be his usual charming smile, but it looked hungry. “One friendly spar, Master Hermione. Surely you’d enjoy having a sparring partner for once.”

Hermione shook her head and reached for the basin. “It’s out of the question. We’ve spent too much time discussing this already. We should get back to—”

“Your invitation to stay in the city lasts indefinitely. We’re at no shortage for time.”

“Yes, but I can’t risk anyone seeing me.”

Riddle stood and sank his foot into the stone of the courtyard. Sheaths of stone rose up to block the doors at either ends of the private courtyard. “No one will see.”

Hermione could think of no more excuses. Looking up at Riddle, Hermione let herself consider how it would feel to fight him. Hadn’t she wanted it yesterday, watching spar after spar? Hadn’t she imagined the approaches she would have taken in each fight? She knew she had no chance against Riddle—and yet she itched to show him the flexibility and unique power of waterbending, to remind him of what he was willfully ignoring.

Now Riddle was offering that opportunity to her. He was insisting. And she was nothing if not a gracious guest to her host.

She rose to her feet.

#

Standing opposite Granger, Tom felt ready.

Hardly a dozen benders had ever noticed his reliance on a bedrock of firebending forms. Of those few, only Granger had ever taken issue with the approach—and Tom looked forward to showing her exactly how wrong she was. The Fire Nation needed nothing from anyone else, and as Avatar, he would bring a new balance: each element, each nation, would bask equally in the Fire Nation’s enlightenment.

This was exactly what the waterbender needed. Granger was sentimental, clearly clinging to her feelings for her tribe, allowing them to cloud her judgment.

But she was conflicted, too. She’d disobeyed her tribe all her life, so clearly she already answered to a higher power: her own abilities, the pursuit of self-actualization. When her style fell to Tom’s, surely she would realize that she was blinkered by her defensive feelings about the Water Tribe. All she had to do was let go, and she would be free to come out from the shadows. And Tom, of course, would support her in every step. He would be attentive, flattering, a patron. And so he would clinch the critical tool for his success.

Fifteen paces apart, they stretched out their hands in unison. The sun had grown high and hot. Somewhere in the distance was the caw of a raven.

Tom moved first. He bolted for the pool in the center of the yard and formed a fist with his right hand, molding the element to his will. A cannon blast of water shot out from the pool toward Granger. A probe. What would her strategy be?

She sidestepped and wheeled her arms over her head, turning the water back toward him in a classical waterbending form. Exactly as he’d expected. Redirection was little more than evasion. With two hard punches, Tom burst the jet of water into an explosion of snow. A spinning back kick, and the burst of flakes swooped together, compacting into another projectile aimed Granger’s way. But she threw out her hands to receive it and slung the ball of snow across the yard, melting and refreezing it so the brick was coated in a thin sheet of ice.

Tom knew at once what she meant to do. He leapt forward onto the ice as she did the same. They hurtled toward each other at such high speed that the air whistled in Tom’s ears, and as Granger neared the pond, she called up needles of ice which she flung at him one after another. Rather than handle each individually, Tom crossed his arms, summoning a thin shield of water to wrap around himself, shattering the needles with a sound like a hundred wind chimes hitting stone.

He saw Granger’s concentration through the shimmering layer. Her left hand came up. She was expecting to block or redirect another frontal attack.

Instead Tom dropped flat to the ground, stabilized himself with palms splayed, and kicked high. A fist of ice formed from the layer beneath Granger, punching up at her.

She hadn’t expected it. She sucked a breath and tried to dodge back, but the protrusion of ice caught her shoulder and spun her off-balance. Back on his feet, Tom pressed his advantage. Across the small pond from her now, he sent blast after blast of water toward her, which she dodged frantically, ever more off-kilter. _Nearly there,_ Tom thought, already planning how to break her stance once and for all—but then, with a prickle on the back of his neck, he realized there was a pattern in the wheeling of her arms. She wasn’t off-kilter but in the midst of preparation. It was that influence from the swamp, the overhead circulations from the South Pole—the unfamiliar blend of her own style.

Tom heard a whoosh behind him and whirled around. Five dark streams of water were catapulting toward him from the basins at the yard’s periphery. It was the first time he felt the constrictions of firebending style, for his first instinct was to form the streams into one with a Southern Tribe braid and redirect them skyward—but— _no,_ he thought with teeth gritted, he would use force, he would have order, this element like all others would come into line as he decreed.

Tom scythed the flat of his hand through the first stream to reach him. It split apart with a _smack_ like skin on skin. He seized the end of the stream and used it like a whip to smash the others mid-flow, then slung the first stream back around toward Granger, but in the time she’d bought, she had stabilized herself again, and she dissipated the stream with an easy whip of her right hand. She was closer than before, darting forward with her teeth practically bared. That livid look he’d seen the night before.

Another, harder jolt of excitement through Tom’s body. _An honest fight,_ he found himself thinking—this was maybe the first honest fight he’d had since that cargo ship in his childhood. No playing around with the other nations’ little acts, with tiresome airbender evasion or the artless bluntness of earthbending. No pretending to respect their so-called _arts_. In laying his opinions bare to Granger he’d set himself free.

He flung himself forward, and then they were hand to hand, ribbons of water flying so close and hard that Tom could hear them slicing air, Granger’s breath a hot touch on his shoulder as she ducked past one of his blows. At this distance he could see more clearly her lack of formal training. She was messy, all instinct. He lifted her arms out of his way with sharp blows of his wrist, one, two. With a loop of water she tried to slash toward his chest, but Tom closed his fist and the loop reformed around her wrist in an icy cuff.

Granger let out an enraged sound, and smug satisfaction rolled through Tom. Surely she saw it now, how the Fire Nation’s style allowed him to be both more nimble and more aggressive. Waterbending forms in close quarters meant one could be slippery at best. There was no victory there. No real power.

But Granger had realized the disadvantage too, and she cartwheeled backward, using a rush of water to help her handspring back to medium distance. Tom was reveling in her retreat—this acknowledgment of her failure—when he noticed a strange crook in her elbows.

The handspring had a dual purpose. It wasn’t just retreat but another move of her own. Before Tom could prepare, before he could even think, a line of water was slashing toward him out of his periphery.

Time seemed to slow. Tom formed his hand into a claw, an easy firebending form to tear through an opponent’s wall of flame. But as he twisted and struck, the water slipped just past the form, bending like quicksilver, and drew a thin line of blood across his bicep.

Gone was Tom’s satisfaction. Gone his pride and excitement. Everything shut off except for cold fury.

He wheeled back toward Granger and, with a kind of blindness settling over him, wrenched fistful after fistful of water from the pond. He bore down toward her. Close quarters were her disadvantage, and she knew it. As he approached, she tried to slip away over long arcs of ice. He melted and shattered every one.

Again they were hand to hand. Some animal part of Tom saw the gleam of exhilaration in her eye and a howl of rage awoke in him at the disgrace—the idea that a waterbender had struck him—how could he have thought himself similar to this peasant?—and yet there was a nauseating wrongness pulsing in the back of his mind, because he had been meant to win a flawless victory, she could not be right, it was impossible that he could be wrong.

There. The opening. Granger’s hands busy at her shoulders. He thrust both his fists forward and a bolt of water rocketed up from the pond, then struck her in the midsection, hitting all the air out of her. She staggered back, and he shot a dozen slivers of ice up from the puddles that glimmered all around the yard. With her right hand she shattered the four that would have struck her torso; with her left she wielded a water whip that broke another five. The remaining three connected. They sliced shallow wounds on her calf, her ankle, and her shoulder.

Granger let out a strangled cry and fell back, finally meeting the ground. In the next moment Tom was standing above her.

In the instant of victory, looking down at the waterbender on the ground, a dozen conflicting feelings pounded through Tom. He _had_ won, he had been correct. And he had won revenge threefold, drawn blood three times for her one cut.

Yet, still, she had managed to touch him.

Tom knew he should make the usual comments. _A good spar,_ or _are you all right._ He knew he should stretch out a hand to help her to her feet, the way he had with all the masters yesterday.

But there was something different in the way they were regarding each other now, having drawn each other’s blood. Something had been laid bare. He could see Granger now, prideful in her waterbender’s ways, and Tom had shown in turn how he placed the Fire Nation’s style above the rest. Granger would say nothing, of course, because he held her livelihood in the palm of his hand. One letter from Tom to the Northern Water Tribe and she would lose the home she’d struggled to keep for so many years.

But that pugnacious look on her face, the defiant way she pushed herself to her feet … he had been a fool, he realized, to believe he could show Granger the right path by defeating her. Again he felt that bizarre sensation of understanding. She loathed defeat as much as he did. Anything short of perfection was inadequate. She, too, was a creature of precision.

As Tom caught his breath, he looked down at the thin slash on his arm, resentment eddying again. The fact sank in more deeply: a lone waterbender had broken through his defenses. Of course, he’d fought using other forms for so long … the sudden change in style had been jarring, that was all … it was habit, nothing more.

He glanced over to find Granger healing her cuts. As he watched her place the pads of glowing water first on her ankle, then calf, then shoulder, his resentment deepened into something else, hot as magma.

He realized he was feeling envious of Granger. Genuinely envious, the way he’d pretended to feel yesterday.

“Here,” Granger said shortly, reaching out with one water-covered hand to touch his bicep.

Tom had never been healed by a waterbender before. He watched the bloodied line on his arm thin, straighten, and then seal away into smooth new skin. There was a silvery line. Then there was nothing at all, no scar, no evidence. No pain.

Desire throbbed in him like a new injury. If he could just learn this one Water Tribe method, he wouldn’t need to convince Granger of anything. Yes—so much better not to need anyone. Especially this woman, with her infuriating stubbornness.

“Teach me,” he said.

He did not call her Master, did not play at humility anymore. She met his eyes and Tom saw her skepticism, every ounce of her critical feeling toward him.

“We’re meant to be unlocking the Avatar State,” Granger said.

“I thought you suspected the two were interrelated.”

“Yes. They could be. But I don’t know if you can learn how to heal.”

Tom felt a stab of anger. “Why not?”

“You could never force healing into a firebending form. If you ever want to heal, you can’t think of waterbending as something interchangeable with any other art. You have to respect the origins of healing. The Water Tribe developed the method. The two can’t ever be uncoupled.”

Granger’s tone was no longer placid, her eyes no longer blank. She was tugging her hair out of its bindings with irritation, her brow beaded with sweat, her cheeks tinged with exertion. Eyes fixed resolutely on his.

 _This is how she should look_ , came a stray thought that Tom didn’t really understand. There was some satisfaction in having torn her purposeful emptiness away, even if he felt a prickle of anger to see her returning his gaze like that, unapologetic, stubborn, proud. Hermione Granger, this woman who was nothing.

Tom’s fingertip found his bicep, where the cut had been. His own pride warred with desire.

 _Fine,_ he thought. Let the Granger woman teach him their Water Tribe ways. He could accept that in thousands of years of history they’d developed one useful trick. It would be worth it to be able to heal himself—to protect himself from all that lay ahead.

“Yes,” he said. “I understand. So teach me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading! kudos/comments always make my day :)
> 
> [tumbl away with me!](https://batmansymbol.tumblr.com)


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